Topics: Educational Tours, Israel Tours, Main Topic: Education, Jewish Education, Jewish Identity, Israel Attachment, Israel Education, Israel Experience, Teenagers, Youth, Interviews
Abstract: Yiddish was the everyday language spoken by most Central and East European Jews during the last millennium. As a result of the extreme loss of speakers during the Holocaust, subsequent geographic dispersal, and lack of institutional support, Yiddish is now an endangered language. Yet it continues to be a native and daily language for Haredi (strictly Orthodox) Jews, who live in close-knit communities worldwide. We have conducted the first study of the linguistic characteristics of the Yiddish spoken in the community in London’s Stamford Hill. While Krogh (in: Aptroot, Aptroot et al. (eds.) Leket: Yiddish studies today, Düsseldorf University Press, Düsseldorf, pp 483–506, 2012), Assouline (in: Aptroot, Hansen (eds.) Yiddish language structures, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, pp 39–62, 2014), and Sadock and Masor (J Jew Lang 6(1):89–110, 2018), investigating other Hasidic Yiddish-speaking communities, observe what they describe as morphological syncretism, in this paper we defend the claim that present-day Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish lacks morphological case and gender completely. We demonstrate that loss of morphological case and gender is the result of substantial language change over the course of two generations: while the case and gender system of the spoken medium was already beginning to undergo morphological syncretism and show some variation prior to World War II, case and gender distinctions were clearly present in the mental grammar of both Hasidic and non-Hasidic speakers of the relevant Yiddish dialects at that stage. We conclude the paper by identifying some of the language-internal, sociolinguistic and historical factors that have contributed to such rapid and pervasive language change, and compare the developments in Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish to those of minority German dialects in North America.
Abstract: Jewish communities often do not endorse the idea of intermarriage, and Orthodox Judaism opposes the idea of marrying out. Intermarriage is often perceived as a threat that may jeopardise Jewish continuity as children of such a relationship may not identify as Jews. When a Jewish woman marries out, her children will in any case become Jewish by halakhah – the Jewish law – by which Judaism is inherited from mother to child – and thus usually faces less difficulties over acceptance in Jewish communities. Even though the Torah speaks of patrilineal descent, in post-biblical times, the policy was reversed in favour of the matrilineal principle, and children of Jewish men and non-Jewish women must therefore go through the conversion process if they wish to join a Jewish congregation according to most Jewish denominational requirements. The aim of this article is to analyse what happens when Jewish men, who belong to Finland’s Orthodox communities, marry out. Do they ensure Jewish continuity, and raise their children Jewish, and how do they act as Yidishe tates – Jewish fathers? If yes, how do they do so, and what problems do they face? These questions are answered through an analysis of thirteen semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with male members of the Jewish Community of Helsinki and Turku in 2019–20.
Abstract: This article addresses the issue of teaching Judaism for students in the teacher-training programme and those training to become clergy in a Swedish milieu. A major challenge in the secular post-Protestant setting is to pinpoint and challenge the negative presuppositions of Judaism as a religion of legalism, whereas the student’s own assumption is that she or he is neutral. Even if the older paradigms of anti-Jewish stereotypes are somewhat distant, there are further patterns of thought which depict Judaism as a ‘strange’ and ‘legalistic’ religion. Students in the teacher-training programme for teaching religion in schools can in class react negatively to concepts like kosher slaughter, circumcision and the Shabbat lift. Even if the explanatory motives vary, there is nonetheless a tendency common to ordination students, relating to a Protestant notion of the Jewish Torah, commonly rendered as ‘Law’ or ‘legalism’. This notion of ‘the Law’ as a means of self-redemption can, it is argued in the article, be discerned specially among clergy students reading Pauline texts and theology. This analysis shows that both teacher-training and textbooks need to be updated in accordance with modern research in order to refute older anti-Jewish patterns of thought. As for the challenge posed by the simplistic labelling of both Judaism and Islam as religions of law, the implementation of the teaching guidelines concerning everyday ‘lived religion’ enables and allows the teacher to better disclose Judaism, Christianity and Islam as piously organised living faiths rather than as being ruled by legalistic principles.
Abstract: This article examines the sense of Jewish vulnerability and exclusion in Europe that has resulted from manifestations, and Jewish perceptions, of the “new anti-Semitism,” and the role of Islamic communities in Europe in propagating this form of hatred of Jews. First emerging in 2000 with the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, and tied in with the Middle East conflict, anger at Israel is directed at Diaspora Jewish communities. This “new anti-Semitism” targets the Jewish collective with the characteristics of anti-Semitism previously aimed at individual Jews. The article focuses on the wave of anti-Semitism that erupted as a result of the 2014 Israeli–Hamas War. Based on an analysis of European Jewish communities, it considers the active part played by European Muslim communities in perpetrating the new anti-Semitism. Using an analysis of survey data, emigration statistics and newspaper opinion articles by leading European Jewish intellectuals, the article considers how the new anti-Semitism is adversely affecting Jewish–Muslim relations and the concomitant sense of “belonging” of European Jewry. The article considers what is required to overcome the new anti-Semitism propagated by Muslim communities to restore a greater sense of Jewish belonging to, and identification with, Europe.
Abstract: A mentally healthy human being can go insane if suddenly diagnosed with leprosy. Eugen Ionescu finds out that even the “Ionescu” name, an indisputable Romanian father, and the fact of being born Christian can do nothing, nothing, nothing to cover the curse of having Jewish blood in his veins. With resignation and sometimes with I don't know what sad and discouraged pride, we got used to this dear leprosy a long time ago.
With these words, the Romanian–Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian expresses within his private diary some of the darkest moments of a World War II “transfigured” Romania, populated as they are by the gothic characters of legionaries, Nazis, and antisemitism. His death soon followed in 1945, when Romania was at the threshold of fascism and communism. However, with the discovery and the subsequent publishing of Sebastian's diary in 1996, and following 50 years of communist mystification of the Jewish Holocaust, the entire chaotic war atmosphere with the fascist affections of the Romanian intellectual elite was once again brought to light with all the flavor and scent of the dark past. In this entry from Sebastian's diary he speaks of his friend, Eugen Ionescu who, born of a French-related mother and a Romanian father, was living in Bucharest at that time. He would later become known to the world as Eugène Ionesco, the famous French playwright and author of the well-known plays The Bald Soprano and The Rhinoceros. The above quote from Sebastian's journal, predating the international fame of Ionesco, but already marking the end of Sebastian's career under fascism, remains a traumatizing testimony of the Jewish Kafkian torment as “guilt,” a deeply claustrophobic identity that many Eastern European Jewish intellectuals have learned to internalize. Beyond this symbolism, the publishing of Sebastian's diary in Romania unintentionally challenged an existent post-communist tendency of legitimizing inter-war fascist personalities within the framework of a general lack of knowledge about the Jewish Holocaust in both the communist and post-communist periods.
Abstract: The subject of mental formation of an image about the Other brings together and creates a relationship between areas seemingly not in an obvious connection, such as Cultural Anthro- pology, Imagology, Sociology, and the area of Communication Studies. In other words, the essence of intercultural communication and research is understanding how cultures, subcultures, or, better said, groups generally communicate to others and among themselves. Because any communication is fundamentally intercultural, it means accepting the Other, understanding the cultural game differences and different ways of thinking. Having the central focus of analysis on imagology and ethno-psychology, the theme of the research is to show how the Jewish community of Romania has built their auto-image and hetero-image in recent years. This contributes to observing the construction of identity through multiple attributions that make a differentiating picture. The study aims to show how the identity and alterity are built through images about the Self and images about the Other. This type of analysis has been applied in various ways to different ethnic or cultural communities, as members issued their own perceptions of the world and of alterity, conceptualized through images and symbols. Images about ourselves and about the others have an important role in social construction and they result of, and depend on, how we relate and communicate with the Other. If the socio-mythical-economic portrait of the “Jew” has been so far widely discussed in Andrei Oişteanu’s work (2004), which is based on the stereotypical image of the Jews in European culture until the early 1970s – 1980s, this paper tries to illustrate how the image of the Romanian Jewish community is being perceived today. This research is part of a larger study dealing with life stories as means of intercultural communication and has as a central point the stories of the Shoah survivors.
Abstract: It is a fact, that the Holocaust of European Jews has marked in various ways the Jewish diaspora and the Jewish presence worldwide. In the case of the Jews who live in Greece and especially in the city of Thessaloniki, though the Community delayed to break silence about this traumatic historic event, this fact was never let slip from memory. In the public sphere of action, the updating of Holocaust takes place through community actions at first hand and, later, through initiatives from local authorities, by making mnemonic and memorial donations. For the past seventy-four years, Holocaust inheres as a memory in three post-war Jewish generations in Thessaloniki and seals diversely the identity of the social subjects. This mnemonic event in collaboration with the social and politic developments and turmoils, describes the identity of the Jewish element, both directly and indirectly. The presentation will be focused on qualitative empirical data of fieldwork, from a sociological analysis perspective. More specifically, in this paper it will be explored the way in which, the Holocaust of the Greek Jewry emphasizes on the individual and collective responsibilities and, at the same time, it’s function as a contemporary conservation mechanism of the Jewish identity, a cohesive bond of the Greek-Jewry in Thessaloniki.
Abstract: Η μακρόχρονη ελληνο-εβραϊκή παρουσία στην Ελλάδα παρακολουθεί τις πολιτικές και κοινωνικές αλλαγές που επισυμβαίνουν στην ελληνική κοινωνία, η οποία βαθμιαία εκκοσμικεύεται και εκσυγχρονίζεται. Εξετάζοντας την περίπτωση της ελληνο-ισραηλιτικής παρουσίας, βάση οργάνωσης των Ισραηλιτικών Κοινοτήτων είναι η κοινότητα (ένας κοσμικός θεσμός) και όχι η θρησκεία (ο θρησκευτικός θεσμός), κατά συνέπεια η ταυτότητα των σύγχρονων Ελληνίδων Εβραίων γυναικών παρουσιάζεται εκμοντερνισμένη. Και αυτό, επειδή αφενός ο θρησκευτικός προσδιορισμός έχει λάβει περισσότερο πολιτιστική σημασία και αφετέρου, διότι οι γυναικείοι ρόλοι διαδραματίζονται εντός και εκτός του εβραϊκού περιβάλλοντος, αφού οι δρώντες άνθρωποι περιδιαβαίνουν τόσο εντός των ιουδαϊκών ορίων, όσο και εντός της εκκοσμικευμένης ελληνικής κοινωνίας.
Στο πλαίσιο της μοντέρνας αυτής πραγματικότητας, ο ρόλος των γυναικών κινείται ανάμεσα στην παράδοση και στη νεωτερικότητα, εφόσον τα γυναικεία υποκείμενα από τη μία πλευρά αποδέχονται την πλήρη ενσωμάτωσή τους στην κοσμική ελληνική κοινωνία, και από την άλλη πλευρά θεωρούνται άτυποι φορείς διατήρησης της ιδιαίτερης παραδοσιακής εβραϊκής τους ταυτότητας. Στόχος της παρούσας εισήγησης, είναι να διερευνήσει τον τρόπο με τον οποίο οι Εβραίες γυναίκες στην Ελλάδα διαχειρίζονται την παραδοσιακή και ηθική πλευρά της ταυτότητάς τους, σε πλήρη συνάρτηση με το εκκοσμικευμένο ελληνικό πλαίσιο.
Abstract: Thessaloniki, due to its geopolitical position, has functioned as a crossroad of many people and many religions. In particular, the Jewish presence reached its apogee during the Ottoman period (15th-20th Century). Over the past hundred years, after the official annexation of Thessaloniki to the Greek state, the identity of the Jews changed. Despite the numerical weakness of the old ethno-religious Jewish community during its annihilation in the years 1941-44, today, once again, Jews claim a place in the city life. This paper will focus on the contemporary Jewish female presence in Thessaloniki. On the one hand, Jewish women have their own role contributing in various ways to the maintenance, transmission, and reproduction of their particular ethnoreligious identity. On the other hand, they negotiate their active role in the modern Greek society. In other words, the author investigates the ways in which Jewish women negotiate between tradition and modernity, between their own traditional and modern identity.
